Encouraging news about young-adult anglos

The Gazette, David Johnston

Another stereotype up-ended: Most young anglophones born and raised in Quebec do not want to head off to better-paid pastures elsewhere.
This news appeared in statistical form in survey results made public last month, and in personal form in a Gazette series which began yesterday.

Reporter David Johnston, talking to a number of young-adult anglos, found that most of them speak better French than their parents’ generation, and so find it easier to plan their lives here. That attitude is surely linked to 2006 census data, which said decades of decline in Quebec’s anglophone population finally stopped between 2001 and 2006, when the anglo population actually increased a bit.

It resonates, too, with what the anglo-organizations umbrella group called the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) is reporting. The QCGN’s survey of 400 English-speaking Quebecers between the ages of 16 and 29 found that a clear majority want to remain in Quebec, and to move past the old “two solitudes,” truly embrace bilingualism, and share their lives with franco-phone friends and work colleagues. In their different ways, many of the people our man Johnston interviewed said the same things. Read more…